Page Tools

It's hard to read Virginia Haussegger, or to listen to her on
radio, and not find yourself liking her. In particular, I admire
her honesty. Since 2002, when she threw open the doors on her
reproductive journey and its unwanted destination, Haussegger has
never been anything less than forthright about the pain she feels
over finding herself unintentionally childless.

Haussegger's ongoing personal journey both structures and
animates Wonder Woman. In it, she tries to make sense of
the "creeping non-choices" that led to the moment in the doctor's
surgery where she was briskly told she'd left her run to motherhood
too late. The book also represents the author's working through of
her grief about missing out on motherhood, and her efforts to
reconstruct a new imagined future, and identity, for herself as a
woman without children.

Haussegger writes movingly of the events leading up to the
opinion piece in The Age that shook the world
(then-Opinion editor Paul Austin nominated it as the piece
published in recent years that had generated the most response),
and about the distress that can be found in unexpected places when
life-long habits, such as the carting of carefully labelled boxes
full of journals and photos from city to city, are recognised as
having been geared towards children who aren't to be.

"When I was very young I was entranced by the few old photos we
had of my mother and father when they were young . . . I
desperately wanted to know what my mother was like when she was
little . . . The fading photos gave some clues, as did the precious
jewellery box my mother kept hidden away . . . Every piece held a
story, every story I would demand to hear over and over again . . .
Now at 40 years old, I've built up a box of treasures of my own. I
just don't know who to show them to."

I cried at this line, which comes near the book's end, the
cleanness of the emotion a welcome relief from the turbulent
confusion engendered by the preceding (and subsequent, as it turned
out) text. Because while Haussegger is a wonderful raconteur, and
demonstrates a clear gift for exploring emotions - her own and,
through interview, those of others - she desperately lacks any
capacity to think her way out of the complex problems she explores
in Wonder Woman.

Despite having read most seminal and popular feminist texts -
from The Second Sex to The Female Eunuch to
Backlash - she clearly failed to absorb their central and
most important message: that the personal is political.

And without this understanding, or some structural framework to
make sense of her experience and those of other women in terms
other than those proffered by liberal individualism, Haussegger
lacks the tools to extricate herself from the circular path of
self-blame and DIY solutions that have characterised her journey,
and to cut a clear path forward for her female readers.

This is not to say that she does not, on rare occasions, allude
to such politics and their potential for women's liberation. Having
begun the book with her familiar refrain that it's "high time to
rethink feminism's messages and the 'have it all' mantra that's
been thumped into the brains and parlance of post-feminist women",
Haussegger then tentatively contradicts the implications of this
claim - that feminism needs a less ambitious message - with a
one-line assertion that "(encouraging) young women to lessen their
expectations, rather than raise them by demanding more equity and
support, is doomed".

But this theme quickly drops away, only to be briefly and
somewhat incoherently resurrected in the book's last few pages (I'm
afraid I have no idea what the approvingly quoted Nicola Roxon
means when she asserts that contemporary feminists must fight "to
be ourselves"). And so we are left with the bizarre hypothesis that
the real problem facing contemporary women is that feminists didn't
tell them they couldn't have it all, rather than the fact that even
in post-feminist times, they still can't.

The job of articulating this obvious truth was left to shadow
health minister Julia Gillard who launched the book at the National
Press Club early this month. Gillard spoke eloquently of the need
to move "beyond the lament" and to "go forward, to carve out more
change and to do what we need to do now so (that the life of girls)
is more full of real choice than that of today's woman".

You said it, sister. The question is: why didn't Haussegger?

Leslie Cannold is an ethicist, researcher, writer and
commentator. Her latest book, What, No Baby? Why Women Have
Lost the Freedom to Mother, and How They Can Get it Back, is
published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press at $29.95.